Anyone Can Live on Rubles, if . . .

September 09, 1991

In the U.S.S.R., it seems, it is possible to live even betteron rubles than dollars! So says Elizabeth Shogren, correspondent for the American newspaper Los Angeles Times, who explains that the problems of Americans living in Russia are the same as those of Soviet citizens: finding an apartment, buying meat, and so forth.

We Russians, too, easily could live on rubles if we had a thousand dollars -- a third of the monthly salary of an average American engineer, to say nothing of a famous journalist. That would be 27,000 rubles at the legal exchange rate. But at the same exchange rate, my salary as a professor with a Ph.D. degree from Moscow State University, the author of two monographs and 150 scientific papers, works out to $25 a month.

Certainly it is possible for Americans to live on rubles. But can Russians?

This letter, signed M. Luryo, appeared in the Soviet government newspaper Izvestia.